Tag: best place
‘Be Mine’ Shows the Trump Era Through Frank Bascombe’s Eyes
Half a century ago, at the 1974 Adelaide Festival of Arts, in South Australia, John Updike delivered a muscular manifesto: “We must write where we stand,” he said. “An imitation of the life we know, however narrow, is our only ground.” His call for accurate and specific witness, for a realism dedicated to the here and now, was surely in part an apology for the repeat appearances of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the former high-school-basketball star Updike called his “ticket to
An anti-racist professor faces ‘toxicity on the left today’
Vincent Lloyd is a Black professor at Villanova University, where he directed the Black-studies program, leads workshops on anti-racism and transformative justice, and has published books on anti-Black racism, including Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. Until recently, he was dismissive of criticism of the way that the left talks about race in America. Then he had an unsettling experience while teaching a group of high-school students as part of a highly selective summer program that is convened and
What Should Colleges Care About?
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I asked, “If you were in charge of the admissions office at a top-50 college or university, how would you decide which applicants got accepted as undergraduates and which got rejected?”
Jonathan deems character traits to be the
NEA President Becky Pringle on Vaccine and Mask Mandates
Nearly 90 percent of members of the National Education Association, America’s largest teachers’ union, self-reported in a recent survey that they have been vaccinated against COVID-19. But that still leaves a lot of unvaccinated teachers and school support staff; the union has roughly 3 million members. Becky Pringle, the NEA’s president, has strongly encouraged vaccination, but she told me that regular testing should be available as an alternative to legal mandates: “We have to make sure that school districts work